Organizing for Innovation, special focus on pharmaceutical drug discovery challenges

The ability to generate a stream of new products or services is vital to many firms, since this is the best way to continually adapt to changing markets, competition, and technologies.  This session goes beneath the boxes and lines on a typical org chart to identify the underlying principles for defining, departmentalizing, coordinating, and controlling the work of innovation.  We will discuss the differences between innovative and non-innovative organizing, and how to implement the innovative organizing principles.  Then we will delve into bio-pharmaceutical innovation, focusing on drug discovery and early development, as a special case for innovation that has extraordinary uncertainty and is centered on science.  We will explore how science-based learning can be enabled, and how the knowledge systems of sciences, technologies, and strategic management can be intertwined to frame the complex search space of drug discovery.  This special case extends the general ideas on organizing for innovation to include very complex, science-based industries that may become more dominant in the economies of developed countries.

Deborah Dougherty
Professor, Management and Global Business
Rutgers Business School

Deborah Dougherty received her Ph.D. in Management from M.I.T.  She has held academic positions at the Wharton School and McGill University, and is now Professor at Rutgers University.  Her research concerns organizing for sustained innovation in complex organizations; innovation in bio-pharmaceuticals; technology (R&D) management, and knowledge management.  She has published more than 35 articles on these topics in academic journals and book chapters.  She teaches Managing Technology and Innovation, Principles of Management, Managing Strategic Transformation, and PhD seminars in Qualitative Methods and Organization Theory.  She was elected chair of the Technology and Innovation Management Division of the Academy of Management, is a senior editor for Organization Science, and has served or is now serving on the editorial board for five other academic journals.